Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide > Overview of Siebel Workflow > General Workflow Principles >

About Siebel Workflow

Siebel Workflow is a customizable business application that allows you to define, manage, and enforce your business processes, thereby creating process automation within Oracle's Siebel applications.

Siebel Workflow orchestrates the various Siebel process automation technologies. A Siebel Workflow Process graphically sequences a series of automation steps that support a business process, and it specifies inputs and outputs for individual steps and for the workflow process as a whole.

Challenges you can address when using Siebel Workflow to manage a business process in your organization include:

• Automating escalation of events and notification of appropriate parties.
• Routing and assigning work.
• Processing work.
• Enforcing authorization and transition rules.

Business Requirements That Can Be Addressed With Workflow Management

In theory, businesses are managed according to policies and procedures that allow efficiency, quality service, adherence to contractual agreements, and profitability. Business processes that these policies enforce include:

• Allowing that response time objectives are met for customer callbacks and open service requests.
• Specifying review policies for important processes, such as contracts, quotes, or product shipments.
• Monitoring service requests or opportunities over time.

In practice, the benefits of policies often are not realized because policies are not consistently enforced. This condition can exist due to the large number of business processes in the business environment or the dynamic nature of the information being monitored.

The management of important events is central to the enforcement of business workflow. Workflow Management is the timely management of an event to allow proper handling. For example, a service department has procedures for managing an open service request or making sure a measurable response time is met. A workflow process can increase the visibility of these processes within an organization and check that they are correctly handled.

A service department has sets of defined rules that match their policies:

• Standards for processing calls. For example, when a Severity 1 call is assigned, the new owner is automatically paged.
• Contracted service agreements that must be adhered to. For example, a customer can purchase a support agreement guaranteeing a callback in two hours and problem resolution in four hours.

A sales department also has rules to enforce required business practices:

• Discount authority. If a sales representative quotes a discount exceeding the maximum discount allowed, it requires the approval of the district sales manager or VP of Sales.
• Pipeline management. Each sales representative manages his or her pipeline to promote sufficient levels of prospects at each stage of the sales cycle. If an area of the pipeline needs attention, the representative or manager must be alerted.
• Forecasting accuracy. Opportunities that are forecasted but never closed or forecasts having wide discrepancies with the actual revenue must be flagged.